ABSTRACT

Early in his 1598 ‘Preface to the Reader’ in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Richard Hakluyt makes apologetic reference to the ‘homely and rough-hewen shape’ of his massive compendium of voyaging narratives and related documents. 1 Since this note of humility is immediately negated by an anaphorically-heightened rehearsal of his labours in compiling his collection (‘what restlesse nights, what painefull dayes, what heat, what cold I have indured’) it seems likely that the classically educated Hakluyt was affecting a rhetorically seemly tone here rather than offering a frank assessment of the collection’s final worth. 2 Yet ‘rough-hewen’ is actually an apt characterization – more apt, certainly, than J.A. Froude’s 1852 nomination of The Principal Navigations as ‘the Prose Epic of the modern English nation’, a historically over-determined description that nonetheless (in Richard Helgerson’s words) ‘attained almost the status of unquestioned fact’ from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. 3